The present invention relates to product handling machinery such as packaging machinery and relates more particularly to stackers such as used in packaging machinery for grouping products together prior to envelopment in a wrapper.
Numerous designs for product stackers in packaging machinery are known from the prior art. U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,276,744 and 3,086,334 disclose stackers for grouping various products fed to the stacker in series. In the earlier patent, sticks of gum are assembled in groups of five by a stacker and then enveloped in a single wrapper to produce the package sold on the retail market. The stacker receives the sticks of gum serially in a horizontal position and develops a vertical pile or stack of the sticks by inserting the serially fed sticks one under the other. Then the stack is displaced into a wrapper positioned in the path of the stack and the wrapper is folded around the stack in a tumble box.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,086,334 a stacker is disclosed which functions as a metering apparatus for collecting individual baked goods such as cookies and the like in numerically similar, horizontal stacks, that is stacks in which the products stand directly on a support surface in side by side contact.
It is a general object of the present invention to disclose a stacker for grouping products in horizontal stacks when the products are received, and correspondingly, discharged at relatively high rates.